Three Everyday Practices to Put Your Emotions in Order
Sometimes you aren’t sure about what you really feel. However, at other times, certain excesses tip the balance of your emotions toward anger, sadness, anxiety, or some other uncomfortable feeling that reduces your sense of well-being. For this reason, it’s a good idea to put your emotions in order. This doesn’t mean putting them in a line and keeping them at bay. As a matter of fact, it means balancing them.
All too often, you find your emotions aren’t exactly in sync. For example, a busy day often leaves you feeling rather churned-up in both your mind and your heart. Too much compromise or too much pressure has the same effect. Therefore, it’s a good idea to design a routine to put your emotions in order.
It’s quite common to forget to introduce practices aimed at maintaining your emotional balance. However, these are extremely important to prevent those dispersed and unassimilated emotions from generating discomfort. In this article, we talk about three daily practices that can help you put your emotions in order every day.
“ Our bodies are our gardens – our wills are our gardeners.”
-William Shakespeare-
1. Eat breakfast in silence
If you usually eat breakfast alone, this practice can be really helpful to get your emotions in order. That’s because the beginning of the day is one of the most important. Unfortunately, it’s also often one of the times of greatest stress and rush. However, starting a day in this way isn’t convenient, because it puts you at an immediate disadvantage.
Having breakfast in silence means turning off your mobile phone, putting away the newspapers (if you usually read them), turning off the radio, television, and everything that connects you with the outside world. It’s a time to enjoy both what you’re eating and the silence. In fact, this brief period is a way of calming your internal waters. The overall effect is a feeling of greater serenity.
If you have breakfast as a couple or as a family, you can also disconnect to a certain degree. For example, don’t talk about something that generates concern, but about stimulating topics like weekend plans, anecdotes, or memories of what you did well yesterday. Gradually, your mind will get used to not indulging in negative thoughts at this time of day.
2. Practice mindful breathing for five minutes
If you want to put your emotions in order, the ideal is that every day, you spend five minutes of your time practicing mindful breathing. A good time to do this is partway through or at the end of the day. You should be in a place where no one can interrupt you. It’s even better if there’s no external noise and it’s a nice place to be in.
You just have to sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes, and begin to breathe in and out very slowly. You don’t have to think about anything. This is not a time for worries, unresolved issues, or plans for later to be running through your mind.
The objective is that you accompany your breath, throughout its journey, with your thoughts. Focus on how the air enters your body and then goes to your lungs. Then, on the way it leaves your body and goes outside again. Remember that you only need to do this for five minutes a day for it to make a big difference in your life. However, you must do it every day.
3. Prioritize yourself
It’s well worth introducing an act of personal prioritization each day. Indeed, every day is a good day for attending to your needs, your tastes, your preferences, or your dreams. You deserve a moment in every day for this, and you must find time for it.
You may not be able to enjoy big rewards every week, but you can enjoy small and successful ones. For instance, sometimes it’s enough to just enjoy a warm bath, without worrying about anything else. Other times, you’ll get the same results by doing an activity that you enjoy.
You might think that the day isn’t long enough for these kinds of activities. However, if you just give them a try, you’ll see it’s always possible. In fact, a little act of personal prioritization has a wonderful effect on your mood and your enjoyment of life. Therefore, don’t ignore it.
Putting your emotions in order should be something you do on a daily basis. Because, just as emotional disorder has a cumulative effect, so does order. Therefore, if you introduce routines that help you build order on a daily basis, you’ll see how, in a short time, your mood becomes more stable. Furthermore, it’ll be reflected in all aspects of your life.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
Camps, V. (2011). El gobierno de las emociones. El gobierno de las emociones, 1-333.